community.general/CONTRIBUTING.md

Ansible Community Information

The purpose of the Ansible community is to unite developers, system administrators, operations, and IT managers to share and build great automation solutions.

This document contains all sorts of information about how to contribute and interact with Ansible. Welcome!

Ways to Interact

There are a lot of ways to join and be a part of the Ansible community.

Sharing Ansible with Others

You can help share Ansible with others by telling friends and colleagues , writing a lblog post, or presenting at user groups (like DevOps groups or the local LUG or BUG). You are also welcome to share slides on speakerdeck, sign up for a free account and tag it “Ansible”. On Twitter, you can also share things with #ansible.

Sharing Tips and Tricks

Join the Ansible mailing list (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/ansible-project) and you can share playbooks you may have written and other interesting implementation stories. Put your Ansible content up on places like github to share with others.

Sharing A Feature Idea

If you have an idea for a new feature, you can open a new ticket at (https://github.com/ansible/ansible), though in general we like to talk about feature ideas first and bring in lots of people into the discussion. Consider stopping by Ansible project mailing list at (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/ansible-project).

Helping with Documentation

Ansible documentation is a community project too! If you would like to help with the documentation, whether correcting a typo or improving a section, or maybe even documenting a new feature, submit a github pull request to the code that lives in the “docsite/latest/rst” subdirectory of the project. Docs are in restructured text format. If you aren’t comfortable with restructured text, you can also open a ticket on github about any errors you spot or sections you would like to see added. For more information on creating pull requests, please refer to the github help guide: https://help.github.com/articles/using-pull-requests.

Contributing Code

The Ansible project keeps it’s source on github at http://github.com/ansible/ansible and takes contributions through github pull requests.
See https://help.github.com/articles/using-pull-requests.
When submitting patches, be sure to run the unit tests first “make tests” and always use “git rebase” vs “git merge” (aliasing git pull to git pull --rebase is a great idea) to avoid merge commits in your submissions. We’ll then review your contributions and engage with you about questions and so on. Please be advised we have a very large and active community, so it may take awhile to get your contributions in! Patches should be made against the 'devel' branch.

Contributions can be for new features like modules, or to fix bugs you or others have found. If you are interested in writing new modules to be included in the core Ansible distribution, please refer to the Module Developers documentation on our website at http://www.ansibleworks.com/docs/moduledev.html.

The proverbial 'Zen of Ansible' encourages simple, readable code and consistent, conservatively extending, backwards-compatible improvements. Code developed for Ansible needs to support Python 2.6+, while code in modules must run under Python 2.4 or higher.

Reporting A Bug

Bugs can be reported to http://github.com/ansible/ansible after signing up for a free github account. Before reporting a bug, please use the bug/issue search to see if the issue has already been reported.

When filing a bug, please make sure to include the following information in the bug report:

• What version of ansible you are using (ansible --version)
• Steps to reproduce the problem
• Expected results
• Actual results.

If you are not sure if something is a bug yet, you are welcome to ask about something on the mailing list or IRC first. As we are a very high volume project, if you determine that you do have a bug, please be sure to open the issue yourself to ensure we have a record of it. Don’t rely on someone else in the community to file the bug report for you.

Online Resources

Documentation

The main ansible documentation can be found at http://ansibleworks.com/docs. As mentioned above this is an open source project, so we accept contributions to the documentation. You can also find some best practices examples that we recommend reading at http://github.com/ansible/ansible-examples.

Mailing lists

Ansible has several mailing lists. The first post to the mailing list will be moderated (to reduce spam), so please allow a day or less for your first post.

(https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/ansible-announce) is for release announcements and major news. It is a low traffic read-only list and you should only get a few emails a month.

(https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/ansible-project) is the main list, and is used for sharing cool projects you may have built, talking about Ansible ideas, and for users to ask questions or to help other users.

(https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/ansible-devel) is a technical list for developers working on Ansible and Ansible modules. Join here to discuss how to build modules, prospective feature implementations, or technical challenges.

IRC

Ansible has a general purpose IRC channel available at #ansible on irc.freenode.net. Use this channel for all types of conversations, including sharing tips, coordinating development work, or getting help from other users.

Miscellaneous Information

AnsibleWorks Staff

AnsibleWorks is a company supporting Ansible and building additional solutions based on Ansible. We also do services and support for those that are interested. Our most important task however is enabling all the great things that happen in the Ansible community, including organizing software releases of Ansible. For more information about any of these things, contact info@ansibleworks.com

On IRC, you can find us as mdehaan, jimi_c, Tybstar, and others. On the mailing list, we post with an @ansibleworks.com address.

Community Code of Conduct

Ansible’s community welcomes users of all types, backgrounds, and skill levels. Please treat others as you expect to be treated, keep discussions positive, and avoid discrimination or engaging in controversial debates (except vi vs emacs is cool). Posts to mailing lists should remain focused around Ansible and IT automation. Abuse of these community guidelines will not be tolerated and may result in banning from community resources.

Contributors License Agreement

By contributing you agree that these contributions are your own (or approved by your employer) and you grant a full, complete, irrevocable copyright license to all users and developers of the project, present and future, pursuant to the license of the project.